It is great that the new Mortal Kombat is back, and looking fresher than ever, but like it or not there have been some right crazy ideas along the way, events that you have probably locked out of your mind because they were so much of a nightmare that they were best left forgotten. To help you reach those all too endearing memories here is my run down of the greatest hits and misses of the Mortal Kombat series

The Greatest Hits…

Having great game designers: Ed Boon and John Tobias.

Behind anything great lie special people with ingenious ideas. In this case Ed Boon and John Tobias, both with special and some would say gory ideas on where fighting games should go. Having completed work on Smash TV, Boon turned his attention to a game which was originally going to be based on the popular actor martial artist Jean-Claude Van Damme. The idea fell through and Mortal Kombat was born. Hard to believe that Mortal Kombat started development in 1991 with just four people; Ed Boon, John Tobias, John Vogel, and Dan Forden. It is a little known fact that Mr Boon provided both voice acting and motion capture for the early games. And if that fails to surprise you, how about this: he provides the voice of Scorpion in all of the games, as well as both feature films. And I bet you didn’t know he provides a Cameo appearance in Ep 3 of Mortal Kombat Legacy? Hmm…bet you are going to tell your fiends about that one…

Having great characters and a great story.

If there is anything that has to be said is that Mortal Kombat has a huge list of characters. By the release of Mortal Kombat Armageddon there were 63 playable characters to choose from, giving it the fourth largest character roster in fighting game history, surpassing Marvel vs Capcom 2’s character roster of 56 but failing to surpass Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi series (which holds 161 if you are interested). But all of those characters wouldn’t count for anything if they were just run of the mill bog standard and boring. Think for a moment about Street Fighter and then ask yourself what set it apart from King of the Fighters or Samurai Showdown. I guarantee it will be the characters and the storyline. You have ninja’s, warriors and just plain ‘insane in the brain’ nutcases that will stop at nothing. As for the story, yes it is that age old battle of good against evil but it is delivered with finesse. Thinking back to when I first saw the first arcade machine years ago I had to admit there was something very, very dark and serious about Mortal Kombat that I don’t think has been repeated since.

Breaking new ground.

Mortal Kombat is fondly remembered for many things, most notably its high levels of blood, guts and gore, including its graphic Fatalities – finishing moves, requiring a sequence of buttons pressed in order to perform an ultra realistic (and ultra bloody) execution to your opponent. This in part, led to the creation of the ESRB and highlighted the need for censoring violence in video games bringing with it the new ‘age rating’ for gaming titles. The use of digitized sprites was also a feature of the game’s creation, which at the time was completely different to the hand-drawn cartoon style of approach which was the norm for the time (a game called Pit-Fighter tried the digitized style but it was very chunky and frankly didn’t work well at all). The control system also broke new ground, with six buttons that were high punch, low punch, high kick, low kick, block, and run (run was added in “Mortal Kombat 3”). Block and run buttons were never used in fighting games previously and have never been used since; yet we know they work and elevate the fight because they work in this game. Later games also introduced the ‘change stance’ button which surfaced in other games such as Tekken.

There is a reboot on the way

Not the ultra gritty Re-birth and web-series Legacy; no we are talking a fully fledged reboot; a re-vamp that is said to be much like the first movie but how they wanted to do it originally which is very dark. Not much else is known about it but we know it was defiantly going ahead because Threshold Entertainment filed a new breach of contract lawsuit to prevent it from moving forward. Hopefully it will all work out because the release date is penned for 2013. I am really hoping it comes to fruition because although I quite like the idea of Mortal Kombat legacy I don’t like the ‘Smallville’ way the are messing around with the mythology; as the saying goes ‘if it ain’t broke don’t try and fix it.’ hey if it works for Batman and Spiderman with all their years running the same story then trust me it ain’t broke.

Having a great movie: Mortal Kombat.

Say what you will about the Mortal Kombat movie; it still was a lot better than the other rubbish game to movie conversions that came before it. Surrounded by the Tomb Raiders and Resident Evil films it is easy to forget that not too long ago converting a game to a movie was a sure-fire way to create disaster. Who could forget the ‘so bad it stunk’ Street Fighter movie, the ‘so awful it was boycotted’ Double Dragon, or the where the f#@8 did they get the idea from ‘Super Mario Brother’s movie’. Mortal Kombat at least had characters that looked like their on screen counterpart, a plot that came from the game and who could forget that ‘bangin theme tune’. No wonder it still stands today; obviously the less that is said about it’s sequel the better.
The Misses

Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub Zero

Sub-Zero -the most enigmatic character from Mortal Kombat had his own spin-off in 1997, in the first of was originally intended to be a series of mythologies chronicling each characters back history. Sounded good on paper but in reality most games players will admit that even if the first stages were interesting it quickly became a mess of poorly digitised actors, poorly rendered cut scenes, disastrous costume and level design and that’s not mentioning game-play so frustrating, unforgiving and just plain downright annoying that it left many players with bite marks in their controllers. No wonder it quickly found itself relegated to the trade-in bin mere days after it was released.

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation

Most people hold the first Mortal Kombat movie in fairly high regard, especially when compared to the likes of the Street-Fighter movie, so with all fairness it did not fair too badly at the box office. So hey, what better way to spoil a franchise then by bringing in the big cash cow film studios to ruin things. The script and any other resemblances to the game was thrown out of the window, along with the entire cast only to be replaced with a bunch of Z-listers who if you met them you would probably just ignore, and then, just when you think it could not get any worse; in a crazy effort to mimic the game’s ‘Animalities’ it decided to bring in ridiculous CG monsters with made-for-TV quality special effects in a fight sequence you can barely make out. Three words: Bad, Very Bad.

Sweat, Sweat and More Sweat – Mortal Kombat SNES Version

Although almost comical by today’s standards, Mortal Kombat perhaps holds the title for being one of the most violent games of the 90’s. When news came out that Mortal Kombat was going to be developed for home consoles there was outrage at the level of violence and gore it contained. Parents began going ga-ga with nightmares of their children pulling their faces off and giving them ‘toasties’, giving them solid uppercuts or freezing them and ripping their hearts from fresh from their cadavers. Cue the quick formation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) to monitor violence in games and a rapid toning down of violence. At the time of the game’s Super Nintendo release, Nintendo of America had a strict “Family Friendly” policy firmly in place. This required the removal of graphic violence, religious imagery, and mentions of death from all game content. This meant that the Nintendo version had characters that sweated upon injury instead of bleeding. Given how bloody the original game was, this meant that it had more sweat than an R-Kelly and Usher music video combined and left Kano desperately needing some Lynx anti-persperant…probably.
Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm

Mortal Kombat is a violent game isn’t it? So it is kind of hard to imagine it translating well into a Saturday morning cartoon show. However the early 90’s saw just that; an animated series based on the Mortal Kombat fighting game series. With a storyline that served as a sequel to the first Mortal Kombat film what we have here is a mess of ideas. As the show was designed for young kids the ‘sensible’ choice was made to have no violence at all. But how can Mortal Kombat exist without violence; the very idea is absurd and some would even say offensive. Which begs the question of why Defenders of the Realm even made it past the planning stage? In a nutshell it was terrible; actually it was worse than that and thankfully was destined for a rapid game over.

Mortal Kombat: Conquest

Not content with destroying The Mortal Kombat mythology to pieces Mortal Kombat: Conquest dived to new depths by bringing changing the format of the movie into a television series which curiously followed the storyline of razor-hat-wearing monk Kung Lao rather than Liu Kang. On the plus side I was surprised to see Kristanna Loken (star of Terminator 3) as a main character – Taja. If you look closely you can even spot Eva Mendez in an episode. Ultimately though even with their ever so alluring smiles the series was a smoking pile of crap. Viewing figures sunk deeper than the titanic and when the producers panicked they brought out the big guns: Scorpion, Sub-zero, Goro and Smoke. In theory that should have worked except that Goro and Smoke were both badly computer generated characters and this only served to put the final nail in the coffin, bringing the series an abrupt end at season’s one finale.